Dude, Where’s My Phone Lead?

Sales teams face many challenges, from connecting with leads to closing them, but one challenge that doesn’t get nearly as much attention is the struggle to track a phone lead—especially if it came in from an online source—to its origin and also as it progresses through the sales cycle. When a sale is on the line, the last thing you want to hear your agents saying is, “Dude, where’s my phone lead?!” The ability to track a lead all the way through its cycle can be vital to sales and marketing alike and can mean the difference between a loss and a win.

Tracking Which Marketing Activities Generate Leads

Knowing where your leads are has to start from somewhere, and that’s knowing where your leads came from. If you’re really interested in tracking a lead through its entire cycle, you must start at its origin: at the marketing activity that generated the lead to begin with. For many organizations this is difficult to track, particularly if many of your leads begin online. There’s often a gap in intel when a lead is generated from an online source and then picks up the phone to call. This hurts marketing’s tracking, but it’s also a sales issue: the sales team doesn’t have the information it needs to qualify and/or close the lead, so everyone suffers.

With proper lead tracking technology, you can track which online or mobile search terms drove a lead to visit your website or pick up the phone, an ability that assists both marketing and sales. Marketing is able to measure their ROI, and sales is provided with additional lead information—by means of whisper messages, screen pops, etc.—that gives them a leg up in turning that lead into an account. Knowing where your leads come from is essential in having all the help you can get to close, but what comes after is just as important.

Call Routing: Be in Control of Your Leads

For many businesses, once a lead becomes a lead, all bets are off. It enters the queue of sales calls and makes its way through the phone system like a wayward leaf on a creek. This is often accepted as an adequate means of handling leads, mainly because it is traditionally the way call centers have operated. But it doesn’t have to be. Businesses that use intelligent call routing have the option of steering that lead to the right agent or department based on custom specifications (location, product, etc.) Having this control over where a lead goes means having greater control over its outcome.

CRM Integration: Keeping an Eye on Your Leads

Once a lead is entered into a business’s CRM—hopefully auto-populated by your voice-based marketing automation tool to increase agent productivity and reduce input errors—that shouldn’t be the last time you look at it. With your call tracking data integrated with your CRM—Salesforce for example—you have the ability to see your lead data side by side with your customer information. This means when an existing customer or prospect calls your business, a screen-pop is triggered containing all the information your sales team requires to address the needs of that call. The agent wastes no time searching through the database for the details: you know exactly where the lead is in your system and where they are in the sales cycle based on the analytics at your fingertips. “Dude, where’s my lead?” will never be asked again—from beginning to end.

Olivia Cole is a Senior Marketing Specialist at Ifbyphone. In the past ten years she has worked in multiple industries, writing articles, white papers, eBooks, blog posts, and educational material on a wide range of topics.... View full profile ›